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20,000 Worldclass University Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them – LBRY

20,000 Worldclass University Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them – LBRY

Today, the University of California at Berkeley has deleted 20,000 college lectures from its YouTube channel. Berkeley removed the videos because of a lawsuit brought by two students from another university under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

We copied all 20,000 and are making them permanently available for free via LBRY.

This makes the videos freely available and discoverable by all, without reliance on any one entity to provide them (even us!).

The full catalog is over 4 TB and will be synced over the next several days.

How to Access
Until LBRY launches to the public in April, the videos are only accessible to technical users via the command line.

If you already have access to LBRY, go to lbry://ucberkeley to see the full catalog.

If you want to be notified as soon as the videos are made public to everyone, sign up here.

If you’re command-line-capable but new to LBRY, follow this guide, then access lbry://ucberkeley.

Is This Legal?
Almost certainly.

The vast majority of the lectures are licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows attributed, non-commercial redistribution. The price for this content has been set to free and all LBRY metadata attributes it to UC Berkeley.

Additionally, we believe that this content is legal under the First Amendment.

The Perfect Content for LBRY
While other archive teams have also backed up these lectures using traditional methods, publishing them to LBRY offers greater openness, usability, and robustness.

LBRY is the first truly free and censorship-resistant way to exchange content. The LBRY protocol provides a completely decentralized network for discovering, distributing, and publishing all types of content and information, from books to movies.

When publishing the lectures to LBRY, the content metadata is written to a public blockchain, making it permanently public and robust to interference. Then, the content data itself is hosted via a peer-to-peer data network that offers economic incentives to ensure the data remains viable. This is superior to centralized or manual hosting, which is vulnerable to technical failure or other forms of attrition.